Wednesday, June 24, 2020

Getting a feel for pronunciation: What our pupils can tell us!

Clker.com
What do you do with your eyes when you are struggling to understand something that you are listening to? (Quick: Write that down.) Now some of that, of course, depends on your personal wiring, but this new study “Asymmetrical characteristics of emotional responses to pictures and sounds: Evidence from pupillometry” by Nakakoga, Higashi, Muramatsu, Nakauchi, and Minami of Toyohashi University of Technology, as reported in neuroscience.com, sheds some new "light" on how the emotions may exert influence on our ongoing perception and learning. Using eye tracking and emotion measuring technology, a striking pattern emerges.

From the summary (boldface, mine):
"It suggests that visual perception elicits emotions in all attentional states, whereas auditory perception elicits emotions only when attention is paid to sounds, thus showing the differences in the relationships between attentional states and emotions in response to visual and auditory stimuli."

So, what does that imply for the pronunciation teacher? Several things, including the importance of what is going on in the visual field of learners when they are attempting to learn or change sounds. It has been long established that the process of learning pronunciation is especially susceptible to emotion. It can be an extraordinarily stressful experience for some learners. Even when there are no obvious stressors present, techniques such as relaxation or warm ups have been shown to facilitate learning of various aspects of pronunciation.

Consequently, any emotional trigger in the visual field of the learner can have either "pronounced" positive or negative impact, regardless of what the instructor is attempting to direct the learners' attention to. If, on the other hand, learners' attention is focused narrowly on auditory input and the emotional impact, you have a better chance of managing emotional impact FOR GOOD if you can successfully manage or restrict what is going on in the visual field of the learner that could be counterproductive emotionally (Think: Hypnosis 101. . . or a good warm up . . . or a mesmerizing lecture!)

That doesn’t mean we teach pronunciation with our eyes closed . . . when  it comes to the potential impact of the visual field on our work. Quite the contrary! How does the “front” of the room (or the scenes on screen) feel to your pupils? Can you enhance that? 

To learn more about one good (haptic) way to do that, join us at the next webinars!

Original Research: Open access
 “Asymmetrical characteristics of emotional responses to pictures and sounds: Evidence from pupillometry”.by Nakakoga, S., Higashi, H., Muramatsu, J., Nakauchi, S.,  and Minami, T.
PLOS ONE doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0230775

2 comments:

  1. Obviously for those of us in Haptic Pronunciation Teaching, we need to know how the emotions load when in kinesthetic and/or tactile modality. My guess is that the effect will be more integrated and modulated down. If you know of a good study that digs into that please let us know!

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  2. Interesting. I am not that professional in teaching Pronunciation, but I do want to know more about it.

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